


A Favor You Can't Refuse

by PumpkinDoodles



Series: Taserbones Tumblr Prompts & Tiny (Adorkable) Fics [42]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Brock Rumlow is not quite human, Darcy has a fairy godfather, F/M, Not Canon Compliant, The Lewises have a whole thing with the fae, Witch!Darcy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:33:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26058046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PumpkinDoodles/pseuds/PumpkinDoodles
Summary: The Lewis family has a long relationship with the folk. But Rumlow isn't what Darcy expected would show up in London.
Relationships: Darcy Lewis/Brock Rumlow
Series: Taserbones Tumblr Prompts & Tiny (Adorkable) Fics [42]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1484168
Comments: 54
Kudos: 502





	A Favor You Can't Refuse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ibelieveinturtles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ibelieveinturtles/gifts).



> *I own nothing!

Darcy tells Jane and Erik that she knows about hammers and runes because she’s seen them in books at the library. It’s easier that way. She’s lucky Jane isn’t terribly observant of what’s been happening on the ground in Puente Antiguo, these last weeks. Jane cranes her next skyward and misses the sigils that Darcy traces, almost compulsively, into the sand. Erik forgets his pants at the best of times. They don’t even pay attention to her major, much less her little habits. The way she is always able to find the right parts for Jane’s machinery. How well she cooks with a bare cupboard. The way she yanks Jane out of traffic or finds Erik’s lost socks. Old habits die hard, Darcy thinks, debating whether or not to tell them. She keeps her mouth shut and her eyes open. She’s had a bad feeling--a nervous prickle, the sense of being watched--ever since her internship started. She worries about _something._ She just doesn’t know what it is yet. 

Then Thor falls out of the sky and it all makes sense to Darcy. After she’s tased him. She takes modern precautions, too. Her mother taught her that. But she doesn’t explain her little rituals to her new boss. Jane might think she’s insane.

* * *

Still, Darcy should probably tell Jane that the Lewises are a funny lot. Always pushing their luck, people said, and usually winning. Her great-grandfather mysteriously became richest man in the county after he bought a ramshackle farm in North Carolina; there were rumors he’d found a stash of hidden silver buried somewhere. “He was a pushy roughneck,” Darcy’s mother says when she asks about buried treasure, age five. “He made his money because he exploited every loophole known to man.” Several uncles are famous moonshiners and bootleggers. Her Grandma finds things: lost items, bargains, the right job for the person she’s just run into. There is her Great-Aunt Eula, the family beauty, who married a succession of even-richer men and elevated herself all the way to New York City. She’d done a screentest for MGM, they said, only her last husband didn’t like it, the idea of her perfect face on a fifty-foot screen in the dark. Out there for everybody to see. She had to content herself with local notoriety and sunbathing topless at the family pool on visits home. People used the word _fascinating_ when they talked about Eula. _Crazy_ is the word they use when they talk about Darcy’s Uncle Jack, handsome, reckless, and brave. He survived a night at the Devil’s Tramping Ground after he got his draft notice, just on a dare. Darcy’s grandmother still has his medals from Vietnam. For years, Darcy thinks he died in the war, so she’s surprised when she finds out he died in a car accident. 

“Half the girls in town were in love with him,” her Grandma used to say, with a kind of wistful melancholy, as she doodled sigils at the edges of her coupon circular. “He had real Lewis nerve. Coulda gone all kinds of places. You have to have nerve to get anywhere in this world. Don’t tell your momma I said that.”

“Okay,” Darcy vows. She listens and pays attention to her grandmother’s rituals. When her mother catches her scribbling notes about cursing a third grade classmate, she is visibly angry and scolds her.

“We don’t do things like this, you understand?”

“But Grandma said--”

“She’s wrong,” her mother bites out. “Why do you think Jack died? His luck caught up with him.” Darcy’s mother scorns Lewis nerve. “Be careful,” she tells Darcy. “Don’t push things. Be safe.” Her mother’s little habits are cautious and protective. They make themselves small. Her mother draws sigils and she locks the back door. 

* * *

One afternoon, the two of them come home from the grocery store with armloads of slick, semi-transparent bags. Cans of Campbell’s Soup that ding together, bags of frozen peas that sweat in the humidity, a loaf of bread that her mother warns her not to squish. Darcy is preoccupied with the roll of bubble gum tape she’d begged for by the register. She doesn’t see the man sitting on the porch. 

Her mother drops one of the bags. “Mom, you--” Darcy begins, but he stands up. He is wearing a white suit that seems bright in the dusk. 

“Evening, Miss Lewis,” he says. “And the youngest Miss Lewis.” He smiles. His teeth are as white as his suit. “I’ve been neglecting my visit,” he tells her mother. Darcy is frightened, even though his voice is soft. Years later, she will realize it’s her mother’s frozen body that tips her off, the way her mother stands stock-still.

“It’s no trouble,” her mother says. “Let me get you some tea.” She hurries into the house. Darcy stands there for a moment, uncertain.

“The little princess Lewis,” he says. That is what her grandmother calls her. “You like your new school, huh?” he asks. They’ve recently moved.

“Yes, sir,” Darcy says politely.

“That Heather still giving you trouble?” he says. Heather is the classmate that Darcy wanted to curse. She shakes her head quickly. 

“No trouble,” she says, echoing her mother. She has made the effort to befriend the other girl, trading a scented pencil for better treatment. “She gave me this,” Darcy says, flashing the sticker smoothed carefully on the back of her hand. 

“A gift,” he says. “Good things, gifts.” Darcy nods. His tone is significant. She looks around, following his eyes. At the edge of the hot-pink azaleas, she has placed a collection of of rocks and stones. Odds and ends. Her mother encourages these habits. 

“I painted this one,” Darcy says, picking up a rock. She has swirled it’s dark surface with teal and blue paint. Some of the puff paint dots are flaking off, but she holds it up carefully. “Do you like rocks?”

“I do,” he says.

“Please take this one,” she says, with as much dignity as she can muster at eight. He looks delighted.

When her mother steps out onto the porch, the glasses on the tray clink noisily. The stranger is holding the rock in his hand. “Oh,” her mother says. “Tea with honey?”

“Ah, you remembered,” he says. He slips the rock into his suit pocket and Darcy thinks her mother’s eyes go wide, swiveling to Darcy. Her mother only relaxes when Darcy doesn’t object. She gives the stranger tea very carefully. They exchange a series of elaborate pleasantries. He seems to be asking her mother to ask for something; Darcy’s mother demurs, insisting that he’s done enough for the family over the years. “Not even protection for the little one?” he says, with a kind of amiable stubbornness.

“You are most kind,” Darcy’s mother says. He smiles again, this time a wide smile. His corner teeth seem a little sharp.

“It’s a special relationship, ours and the Lewis family,” the stranger says.

After he is gone, her mother’s body sags in relief. “You gave him a gift?” she asks Darcy. She nods. “I didn’t think he would visit,” her mother confesses. “I’m careful.” She is so mournful, Darcy leans her head against her mother’s shoulder comfortingly. “I’ve never asked for anything,” she adds. That night, she packs a suitcase and drives them to Grandma’s house. 

Her grandmother sits Darcy down over pancakes at breakfast and talks about rules. What’s polite and not polite. Not to say thank you, but instead _you are most kind_. How the fae have visited every generation of the family, ever since Great-Grandpa Lewis’s mother did a good turn for one. “She offered him hospitality when they had nothing,” her grandmother explained. “That’s why he was so good with money. And my parents kept it up. They were grateful. So they keep coming back to see us.” Across the kitchen, her mother slaps down a towel with more emphasis than normal. “Don’t you say nothing!” Grandma says. “You neglected your offering.” She looks at Darcy. “You did good, baby,” she says, squeezing Darcy’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”

* * *

“Jane,” Darcy scolds in London after the Convergence, “what have I told you about _touching weird things?!”_ They are sitting in a SHIELD tent, holding cups of coffee. All her stern lectures on safety and hints about “weird stuff” seem to have fallen on deaf ears when Jane saw the Aether. She’d just touched it, which had led to Elves, and interplanetary disaster, only luckily averted.

“Don’t touch them,” Jane repeats mechanically.

“Five hours,” Darcy mutters, shaking her head. “And universe-collapsing vortexes!” 

“You’ve been lecturing her about this since the pasty elves went _poof,”_ Ian says, grinning slyly. “You seem a little--”

“Fixated?” Jane suggests.

“My point stands,” Darcy says stubbornly, tracing a sigil on the back of her coffee cup with a thumb. The cup is empty, she realizes. She gets up to get more coffee. Darcy has been waiting for the prickling sensation in her nerves to subside, but instead she still feels zings. It’s odd. The Dark Elves are gone, she thinks, as nerve pain dances in her limbs. She takes a series of deep breaths as she walks, scrutinizing the sky. No signs of danger. But she still feels _something._

She is standing in the adjoining tent--the one with the coffee and tea bags and stale donuts--when someone speaks behind her. “There’s the little princess,” a male voice says. Darcy freezes for a moment; no one has called her that since she was eight years old. She turns slowly. The man opposite her is wearing SHIELD tactical gear, but there is _something_ there. He is dazzlingly handsome and his dark hair practically gleams. He must be one of them, she thinks. “I been looking for you,” he tells her. He steps up to the food table, seeming to stand too close to her on purpose. Darcy tries to pull herself together. 

“Tea with honey?” she offers. For two decades, she has been waiting on the man in the white suit to reappear. She hasn’t anticipated someone who can turn her head. The man in tactical gear tilts his head at her quizzically, expression cryptic. His eyes are a deep, warm, forest brown with flecks of green. Fae eyes, Darcy is certain, the more she looks. She has to pull her own eyes away by force. She notices the patch on his uniform. _Rumlow,_ it reads. Names have power, her grandmother always said. She repeats the offer. “Tea with honey, Mr. Rumlow?” she says, unable to keep the softness out of her voice. Is this what glamour is like? She has heard it described, but never felt it. Rumlow snorts.

“I don’t drink fucking tea,” he says.

“Oh,” Darcy says, feeling stunned. He smirks.

“You were raised with that old-fashioned shit, huh?” he asks her. “Honey and politeness and all that bullshit.”

“W-what?” Darcy stutters.

“I’m not one of those,” he says, expression sly. “I’m more like”--he pauses, shrugging-- “somebody who trades in favors, you understand?” He smiles wolfishly. “I like a good transaction. If you need something--” he begins, and Darcy is genuinely afraid she will throw herself at him and end up trapped in the in-between out of sheer physical lust. “--just ask, princess,” he says. 

“I appreciate your kindness,” she says, a little breathlessly. He laughs in her face. She is desperate to ask him why he’s there, but that might constitute a transaction. She is staring at him when he reaches over and very carefully pushes her glasses up her nose. 

“Take care,” he says. She nods.

  
  


The tent--and all of London--seems dimmer when he goes. She wishes that she could call her grandma and talk, but Grandma slipped away last summer. Her mama would not take the news of a handsome visitor well, Darcy knows. She does the next best thing: she hacks SHIELD’s database and searches his name. She expects not to find him, honestly, but that face stares back at her. Darcy is laughing at the screen when Jane comes into the kitchen. “What are you laughing about?” Jane asks.

“His file says he’s _fifty,”_ Darcy says, almost gleeful, “and nobody’s picked up on it?” They lived a long time--and he looked thirty-five, if he was a day. It was hilarious. And that list of accomplishments? The perfect range scores, the physical fitness tests, everything. Does no one at SHIELD know anything about them, she thought? How could a whole organization be so easily tricked?

“Who?” Jane says.

“Nobody,” Darcy says. “A SHIELD guy.”

“Oh,” Jane says, mouth curling in distaste. Darcy doesn’t clarify. If Jane can’t be trusted not to go around touching Aether, then she definitely can’t manage the fae. Instead, Darcy keeps up her mother’s cautious ways: she smoke cleanses Jane’s mom’s house, sketches sigils into the unseen edges of Jane’s equipment, blesses the salt before she makes sea salt caramel brownies for Jane and Ian. She won’t ask for anything, she thinks, but she takes her offerings more seriously. No more of the honey tea cakes that her Grandma taught her to bake. Instead, she leaves a flask of bourbon outside the door. Sometimes small cups of espresso. She thinks he would like those--and is pleased when the flask is drained in the morning or the espresso is absent.

Her luck improves.

Jane’s grant applications seem to sail through. Their housing in Norway falls into place without any real effort on Darcy’s part. Her budgeting is always easy, even with the addition of a third person--Ian--in the household. Darcy is so delighted, she leaves an entire bottle of red wine outside the back door. 

In the morning, the wine bottle is empty. There is an odd scent in the cold air. Darcy sniffs the mouth of the bottle curiously. It smells like wine and _something._ She shivers.

* * *

They cannot solve everything, however. Jane has taken a lecturer’s position in Edinburgh. Darcy is happy--until she catches Ian kissing an old classmate in the street, on her way to a coffee shop near Jane’s new office. Ian stammers excuses. “It doesn’t mean anything, Darce,” he swears. She shakes her head.

“Don’t you understand that only makes it worse?” she says plaintively. The people around them stare. 

Ian moves out that night. Darcy’s heart feels cracked open. She forgets to leave the flask at the back door and there is no one to remind her. She scrambles out of bed, swearing, the next morning. “Dammit, I forgot--” she says, rounding on Jane in the kitchen.

“What?” Jane says.

“I forgot _something,”_ Darcy says. 

“You’ll find it,” Jane tells her reassuringly. “You’re good at that.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says glumly. “I get that from my grandma.” She stares out the window all day, wondering. This calls for amends, she knows. They are easily offended. And she has no idea how touchy he is--or how she ended up with him in the first place. Because of SHIELD? It seems probable.

That night, Darcy decides to wait awhile on the back steps, after she fills the flask. She doesn’t know if he’ll show up or not, but it seems worth a try. Demonstrate her contrition. She is sitting in the dark--skin prickling--when she hears a whistle and the sound of the back gate clanging shut. Darcy keeps her eyes down for a moment, listening. “Nice night, princess,” he says, sitting next to her on the steps. His heavy boots scrape a little in the gravel of the pathway as he stretches out his legs. She has often wondered about just how physical he is at moments like this. _Very_ appears to be the answer.

“Yes,” she says carefully. She pours him a full glass of whiskey and hands it over wordlessly. When his fingers graze her skin, Darcy almost jumps, inhaling sharply. They don’t normally like to be touched or touch people. You are supposed to keep your distance. He chuckles. She cannot help it: she looks at him directly. He is smirking, teeth white in the dark. 

“I, uh,” she begins, uncertain. He sips the drink slowly.

“You what?” he says, as she drops her eyes down again. It is disorienting, that voice. He sounds just like he should, if you believe that he was born in the Bronx when disco was still popular. Almost human, if not for the way she feels turned around in his presence. 

“I forgot--I’m sorry,” Darcy says, then realizes her mistake in horror. You aren’t supposed to say sorry. Ever. _I’m sorry_ means you owe a debt to them. 

“Oh yeah?” he says, sounding delighted. “How sorry, princess?” He leans forward, grinning, and stows the glass on the last step. She is caught now. Her heart is thudding in her chest. His fingers--they are oddly warm--close around her wrist. Darcy is absolutely still as he kisses the inside of her palm, then turns his head to look at her. Those brown eyes gleam in the dark. “Real sorry?”

She is stupidly glamoured, she knows, even as she nods. His fingers thread through hers. A voice that sounds suspiciously like her mother’s in Darcy’s head is screaming warnings as she leads him into the house. She does it anyway. The house is still. Jane must be upstairs, but all she hears is his boot tread on the wooden floorboard and the soft ticking of the clock in the kitchen. She tries not to breathe too rapidly when she finally turns to face him in her bedroom. He smirks at her. Those eyes are dazzling. 

“I--” she begins, “appreciate your kindness, Rumlow.”

“Yeah?” he says. His grin is even more wide. He cups her face gently before the kiss. Darcy melts. After that, everything is hazy. The warmth of his mouth all over her. The faint earthy scent of his body. The grip of his fingers on her skin. 

* * *

She is alone when she wakes up. When Darcy looks at herself in the mirror, there is _something_ about the way her reflection looks back at her. “What happened to your neck?” Jane asks, when she comes into the kitchen. She is relieved to find that time has passed normally. Her Grandma always said they could change things, if they wanted to. 

“Accidental bruise,” Darcy lies. “I need to go buy whiskey today.” 

“Whiskey?” Jane says, frowning.

“I might owe someone...a favor.”


End file.
